Atlantis and the Minoans Oliver D. Smith, Open University Abstract1 In the 1960s and early 1970s it was fashionable among academics to identify Atlantis with Minoan Crete or Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. This Minoan hypothesis or Thera-Cretan theory was proposed in 1909 but did not attract much attention until it was popularised by three books in 1969. However, the hypothesis was criticised and arguably refuted in the late 1970s. Today there is consensus among archaeologists Atlantis never existed. This article details the background, heyday, and demise of the Minoan hypothesis, furthermore, it looks at why the Thera-Cretan theory collapsed. 1 This paper was submitted to the postgraduate archaeology journal Rosetta and it passed review on 17/8/2020, but a day later it was rejected after a specialist editor criticised lack of modern sources cited in the bibliography (see appendix for reviewer’s comments), so I have decided to self-publish the paper. 1 Introduction The island of Atlantis is first mentioned by Plato in Timaeus-Critias2 which claims the Athenian lawmaker Solon travelled to Sais in Egypt where he heard a tradition about a sunken island civilisation named Atlantis; he adapted the story into an epic poem, but it was never finished (Plato: Timaeus, 21c). Nevertheless, Solon told the story to his close friend and relative Dropides, who in turn by word of mouth passed it down to his family (Plato himself was a descendant of Dropides). This oral transmission almost certainly never occurred3. There is no mention of Atlantis in ancient Egyptian records4 and virtually all contemporary classical scholars consider Atlantis to be fictional5 and Plato’s “invention for the purposes of illustrating arguments around Grecian polity”.6 As noted by Julia Annas7 in her Plato: A Very Short Introduction: The continuing industry of discovering Atlantis illustrates the dangers of reading Plato. For he is clearly using what has become a standard device of fiction - stressing the historicity of an event (and the discovery of hitherto unknown authorities) as an indication that what follows is fiction. The idea is that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power. We have missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the seabed. During the 1960s and early 1970s, a sizable number of scholars8 took the Solonic source of Plato’s story at face value and argued Atlantis was Minoan Crete or Thera (Santorini). This Minoan hypothesis or Thera-Cretan theory was notably supported by 2 Plato’s Timaeus and Critias form two parts of a continuous dialogue, see Haslam 1976 3 Smith, 2016 4 Renfrew, 1992 5 Naddaf, 1994; a 1983 survey of 340 professional teaching archaeologists revealed 93.7% present to their students a “negative” viewpoint of Atlantis as a real place, compared to only 1.3% who present a “positive” view (while the remaining 5% are “neutral”), see Feder, 1984: 532-533 for the survey’s results. 6 Dawson and Hayward, 2016: 2 7 Annas, 2003: 42 8 Galanopoulos, 1960a, 1960b, 1960c, 1966; Bennett, 1963; Mavor, 1966a, 1966b, 1969; Carpenter, 1966: 30-31; Vitaliano, 1968; Galanopoulos and Bacon, 1969; Platon, 1971: 303-320; Tschoegl, 1972 2 the classicist John V. Luce who thought Solon acquired a tradition about Atlantis he heard while in Egypt: “Plato, I believe did not invent this tradition… It came to him from his ancestor Solon”9. In 1969, three books popularised the Minoan hypothesis: Voyage to Atlantis by James Mavor (updated in 1990), Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend by Angelos G. Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon, and Lost Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend by John V. Luce. All three books were reviewed by Vitaliano10 who decided Luce’s is the most convincing but dismissed Mavor’s book as poorly written – a view shared by the classicist Moses Finley11 who reviewed both in The New York Review of Books, as well as by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew12 in the journal Nature. Despite Mavor’s book received scathing reviews, he was responsible for organising two expeditions to Thera in 1966 and 1967. The latter resulted in excavation of Akrotiri and newspapers across the globe popularised the idea Mavor had discovered Atlantis with sensational albeit inaccurate headlines13. In Mavor’s own words: “The world press had become our ally”14. Long though before Mavor’s expeditions to Thera, the Minoan hypothesis had a few proponents, although it had “made little or no impact on learned opinion at the time”15. Mavor and Luce both in 1969 credited the archaeologist Kingdon T. Frost as having first identified Atlantis with Minoan Crete, but the Minoan hypothesis was arguably disproven in the mid-late 1970s16, resulting in some proponents like Luce to become sceptical – giving up the theory or substantially revising their views17. 9 Luce, 1969: 35 10 Vitaliano, 1971 11 Finley, 1969a; 1969b 12 Renfrew, 1969 13 Ellis, 1998: 92 14 Mavor, 1990: 152 15 Luce, 1969: 9 16 Fears, 1978 17 Vitaliano, 1978: 160; Luce, 1978: 65 3 Minoan hypothesis in the early 20th century The Minoan hypothesis was first proposed by Kingdon T. Frost in February 1909 who published an (anonymous) two-page article titled “The Lost Continent” in The Times18. Four years later, in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Frost published another article about Atlantis19. His main argument was Solon heard a tradition by Saitic priests of an island civilisation that was destroyed, but he mistranslated or misunderstood some details, as well as embellished the story for his poem. These distortions conveniently explain any discrepancies between the Atlantis of Timaeus-Critias and Minoan Crete: An obvious difficulty in identifying Crete with Atlantis is that Crete is inside the Pillars of Hercules, whereas Atlantis is stated most expressly to have been outside them. Although this objection seems formidable, the confusion can be shown to have arisen in a perfectly natural manner, if we imagine ourselves at Sais and take the same geographical point of view as the Egyptian priests. It is the name which has caused the difficulty, and we are expressly told that the names in the story had been translated into Egyptian and were given Greek equivalents by Solon. The Egyptian version probably said, ‘an island in the furthest west’. Crete, an island in the open sea would indeed have seemed in the furthest west to the coast-hugging [Egyptian] mariners… But in Solon’s time the geographical horizon had widened…20 Plato clearly describes the island of Atlantis outside the strait of Gibraltar in the Atlantic (Plato, Timaeus: 24e), but Frost21 re-located Atlantis to the Aegean Sea by arguing ancient Egyptians had a more limited geographical knowledge than the Greeks. Plato (Timaeus: 23e) dates the destruction of Atlantis 9000 years before Solon’s supposed journey to Egypt c. 590 BCE (roughly 9600 BCE). Curiously, Frost did not explain this discrepancy as a distortion in the oral transmission when Saitic priests had spoken to Solon22. For example since the priests were speaking in a foreign language he could 18 Reprinted in Vidal-Naquet, 2007: 171-178 19 Frost, 1913 20 Frost, 1909 21 Frost, 1909; 1913: 199 22 Frost stresses the oral transmission of the Atlantis tale; if Solon instead read a historical document in Egypt there could not have been distortions because writing unlike word of mouth is unalterable (minus 4 have misunderstood or mistranslated what priests supposedly told him about age of Atlantis’ civilisation); instead Frost offered no explanation why his dating of Atlantis or age of destruction failed to match Plato’s. Frost’s identification of Atlantis with Minoan Crete suffers from the fact many other locations share a number of the same features and so are not unique to Minoan Crete.23 By the same flawed reasoning, Atlantis has been identified with Cyprus,24 Malta,25 Ireland26 and different islands and places, some extremely far-fetched. Nevertheless, Frost won over a few proponents to his theory27. It is perhaps worthwhile below to list the main similarities of Atlantis with Minoan Crete: Atlantis Minoan Crete Athenians fought Atlanteans (Plato, Timaeus: 25c-d) Mycenaean invasion of Crete Atlantis ruled over islands (Plato, Timaeus: 25a) Minoan settlements in Aegean Atlantis had a great harbour (Plato, Critias: 117e) Crete had a port (Kommos) Bull-rituals on Atlantis (Plato, Critias: 119d-e) Bull-leaping at Knossos interpolations). Plato mentions ancient Egyptian documents as preserving the Atlantis tradition, Plato, Ti.: 24e, but he does not say Solon directly read them, Plato, Ti.: 24a; Frost too realised there is no suggestion in Plato’s dialogue, Solon read hieroglyphics. The transmission (of the Atlantis story) from Solon to Dropides was also by word of mouth, see Smith, 2016. Plato mentions a list of recorded names told by the priests to Solon, but the list does not include the actual tradition; it is simply an aide-memoire of names, Plato, Cri.: 113a-b. Dropides’ descendants are noted by Plato to have transmitted the story from memory, Plato, Ti.: 20e, 26a. 23 James, 1995: 78 24 Sarmast, 2006 25 Mifsud et al. 2000 26 Erlingsson, 2004 27 Baikie, 1910: 257-259; Mackenzie, 1917: 106-114; Balch, 1917 5 These are interesting parallels but are not necessarily specific to Crete, for example Carthage had harbours, while rituals and games involving bulls were not limited to the Minoans but different cultures such as Hattians and Canaanites; Plato (Critias. 119e) describes Atlanteans as sacrificing bulls following rituals, but distinctive acrobatic bull- leaping depicted in Minoan art is not mentioned. While Plato (Timaeus: 25a) presents Atlantis as a maritime empire, the extent Minoan Crete of the Neopalatial period (1700- 1450 BCE) was a thalassocracy is disputed by archaeologists28.